Scientists just cracked the viral equivalent of the Enigma code
Peter Stockley is at war with the common cold. It’s a wily adversary: a single, seemingly indecipherable strand of genetic material that lacks a brain or even a complete cell, yet somehow knows how to latch on to an unsuspecting respiratory lining and replicate itself, wreaking havoc on the immune system.
But now Stockley, a professor at Britain’s University of Leeds, thinks he has the upper hand. He has cracked the viral equivalent of the Nazi “Enigma code,” which proved key to winning World War II: a genetic message embedded within the virus’s RNA that tells it how to assemble new versions of itself during replication.
“Down at the kind of molecular level, this kind of biology is like molecular warfare,” Stockley told The Washington Post in a phone interview from his home in Leeds (where he happened to be battling a viral infection of his own). “And this code is a vital part of how the virus attacks.”
Stockley’s findings, which were published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the result of a collaboration between Leeds and the University of York. The first breakthrough came in 2012, when Stockley and his team at Leeds published the first observation of how viruses are assembled.
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